


All the Names We'll Never Know

by ThisChairIsMyHomeNow



Series: You're It for Me [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (sort of), Behind the Scenes, Domestic Bliss, F/F, Falling In Love, Femslash, Friends to Lovers, Light Angst, Maria Hill Feels, Protectiveness, Romance, Sexism, Through the Years, Women's History Month, blackhill - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-10 02:45:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10427400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisChairIsMyHomeNow/pseuds/ThisChairIsMyHomeNow
Summary: “This operation is a waste,” Maria says, as soon as she’s sure Nick Fury is out of earshot.





	

**Author's Note:**

> NOTES: This story takes place within a universe in which the whole Bruce/Natasha pairing didn’t happen. The rest of the MCU we can keep, more or less. But Bruce/Nat was never A Thing. Erase it from your memory. Block out the darkness. IT NEVER HAPPENED, OKAY? FUCK YOU, JOSS. 
> 
> Anyway. 
> 
> To the 5 or 6 other people out there who sail on this ship: this little fic is for you. Enjoy. :)
> 
> And most importantly, Happy Women’s History Month.

“This operation is a _waste_ ,” Maria says, as soon as she’s sure Nick Fury is out of earshot.

Across the table from her, Clint Barton’s eyebrows shoot up, bemused and a little amused. They both look warily at the door Fury walked out of, like they’re certain he is going to pop back in the boardroom to argue the merits of the mission.

“Care to elaborate?” Clint eventually asks, downing half an energy drink in one gulp, because he’s not allowed to do amphetamines anymore, probably.

Maria leans forward and steals another look at the well-thumbed file laid out in front of her. A pair of piercing blue-green eyes stare up at her from the page. Her cheeks feel hot at the sight of them. Those eyes are boring right into her soul.

But this is not about _that._ Her resistance to Fury’s order is at least 94% born from _logic_ , not from a bleeding-heart desire to spare a life, but she knows how it will sound: weak. Either love-sick or squeamish. _Emotional_ is not a word Maria would ever use to describe herself, yet it gets thrown around during meetings by the higher-ups whenever she expresses dissent. No matter how enlightened a SHIELD agent is, they all still seem to second-guess a concept if it came out of a young woman’s head. She needs to chose her words carefully. She needs to make Barton think it’s at least partially his idea if her plan is going to succeed.

“Forget I said anything,” she says, uncharacteristically bashful. As a child, Maria was unstoppable and direct, conducting herself with the sort of bluntness that made teachers laugh and sometimes scowl. She was labeled bossy in puberty; a know-it-all. And so the long journey of making herself smaller had begun, leading up to this very moment.

“C’mon, let’s hear it,” Clint encourages, slamming a now-empty Red Bull can on the table.

“Well...what’s more efficient?” Maria starts socratically, “To fix something, or to throw it out and make an entirely new one?”

“Depends on how bad the damage is.”

“But in general?”

“In general? Better to fix it. Starting from scratch takes a lot more time, money, effort, you name it.”

“Exactly,” she says. “It’s really a shame to waste something useful. Something one of a kind.” She waits to see if it will dawn on him. He’s sharp, and compassionate, so this shouldn’t be a stretch.

“Romanova is the best assassin of our time,” he says, like it’s a revelation, like he understands what they’re potentially losing. “Shit, she’s even better than me.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Maria says, attempting to lightly stroke his ego. He doesn’t seem the type to need it though. He’s one of the few agents who doesn’t seem to mind that she’s younger than him, and female, and all the more offensive: now a higher rank while being both.

“No, she’s the best,” he argues. “She could write the fucking _book_. Can you imagine what we could accomplish with her on our side?”

Bingo. God bless this arrow flinging freak.

“She’d be an incredible asset,” Maria agrees. Clint seems to enjoy rebellion, so Maria decides to backpedal to really seal the deal. “But I don’t know how realistic the idea is. Plus, I can’t ask you to disobey Fury, _Jesus_ —it would be completely inappropriate for me—and it’s a serious risk—”

“Didn’t you say her programming is breaking down?”

“We have reason to believe so, yes. She’s been striking randomly lately. Taking jobs from anybody. She’s vulnerable, out of KGB control. It’s why Pierce wants her taken out. They think she’s more dangerous than ever. She’s erratic.”

Clint rubs at his face, considering it all. “Or maybe she just doesn’t give a fuck anymore. Maybe this is the perfect time to make her an offer.”

Maria is so pleased she could kiss him, if she had any interest in stubbly male mouths, which she definitely does not, and then her mind drifts for a fraction of a second to the lush red lips of Natalia Romanova. But this is not about _that._ It’s not. It’s really not. This is about what’s best for SHIELD. This is about getting the goddamn job done.

She lowers her voice and glances at the door. “If you get in the field and you need to eliminate her, eliminate her. But if you think there’s a chance we can salvage this situation, _bring her in_. Please. Just try. I’d get in more trouble for it than you. _You’ll_ be able to get away with it.”

“Why me?”

“Why you? Same reason anyone gets away with anything around here. By having a penis. Fury got promoted to _Director_ for disobeying orders in Bogota. Also, you’ve been around longer. I’d get court-martialed. You wouldn’t. You’d probably get an attaboy for thinking outside the box.”

“I wouldn’t do it for the fucking credit,” Clint says, squaring his shoulders. “We’re talking about a human life here. I mean, I read the files. Child soldier and everything. I can at least give her the option to start over.”  

“You should go pack,” she says, not letting her sense of triumph show, or her fear of the irreversible. “Jet leaves in an hour.”

He stands determinedly and almost makes it out the door before Maria says, “Oh, and Clint?” to the back of his head. He turns.

“This conversation never happened. I mean it.”

“What conversation?” he asks. He winks.

 

 

* * *

 

  
  
SHIELD gives the Russian spy’s name an Anglicisation and the woman herself three weeks of intensive psychoanalysis before they considering throwing her back out into the field to do their bidding. Maria hasn’t met her face-to-face, but she knows it’s too soon for her to go back to work, and says so in front of a room full of men wearing ties, who starting grumbling about free vacations for enemies of the state.

“ _Vacation_?” Maria repeats. “Have you _seen_ her file? The woman deserves a little break.”

 

**

She plants the idea of starting Romanoff off small in Rumlow’s mind this time, but the plan backfires when the rest of them agree Natasha would be _perfect_ for the Tokyo job, which involves spying on a mafia leader while posing quite literally as an underwear model.

“Will I be required to sleep with him?” Natasha asks Maria when they’re sitting in Maria’s office. She asks it like she’s asking about the weather. This is their first real conversation. Maria almost spits out her coffee.

“No, _Jesus_. That’s—we will never ask you to do that.”

Natasha takes another curious look at the photo of her elderly target.

“Good,” Natasha says, lips curling into a little sly smile, “because he looks like he’d be terrible.”

 

**

The photos of Natasha end up not only all over the internet, but on Grant Ward’s desktop, and he wags his eyebrows at Clint when Clint walks by.

“Thank you for not killing that. This world is a better place with those tits in it,” Maria hears Ward say quietly. She marches over with her arms crossed, ready to reprimand him like the child that he more or less is, but Clint beats her to the (unfortunately only metaphorical) punch.

 

**

“I think we should send a team to Budapest, not Timișoara,” Maria says to Sitwell.

“My intel says Timișoara,” Sitwell says distractedly.

  
“I think we should send a team to Budapest, not Timișoara,” Maria says to Coulson later that day.

“I’ll look into that,” Coulson says genuinely.

  
“I think we need to send a team to Budapest, not Timișoara,” Sitwell says to Director Fury as soon as the meeting starts.

“I agree,” Coulson says brightly, because he looked into it.

“Me too,” Maria sighs.

“We should put Barton on it,” Coulson says. “Who else?”

 “Romanoff is ready,” Maria says, because she’d spoken at length with Natasha about the idea already, over a drink. It’s sort of become a little ritual between them. Usually Agent May joins them.

“I don’t know,” Sitwell says cautiously.

“I have reservations,” Gladwell says, and a few others nod.

“ _What_? Weren’t you the ones wanting to push her right back out into the fray 6 _months_ ago?”

“This is a high stakes operation,” Sitwell says. “Are we sure she’s really... qualified?”

They treated her differently now; like a joke to be passed around. It is as if her sultry beauty erased her skills in their minds. They used to discuss the Famous Black Widow with a hint of respect in their voices, before they’d met her in the flesh, when she was just a shadow, a mugshot. Now they traded photos of her in lingerie.

“Have you ever _seen_ her in combat?” Maria asks, “Or are those pictures of her in a thong making you forget that she’s the most capable fighter among us?”

“—Agent Hill is right,” Fury says definitively, and the room goes silent. “Romanoff is more than capable.”

Maria wants to cry in relief, and then wants to cry at the thought of wanting to cry, because she _never_ cries and won’t, and at this point she’s not sure if that’s a true personality trait, inborn, or because experience made her that way.

 

**

It’s not until Romanoff is on a quinjet halfway across the world and the punching bag has nearly flown off its mount that Maria notices Melinda May standing there in the gym watching her. Her fists stop flying immediately and she hangs on to the bag for a moment to catch her breath. Her rage would almost be embarrassing if she wasn’t certain that May experienced the same level of frustration from time to time.  

“What’d that bag ever do to you?” May asks.

“How do you do it?” Maria demands. “How do you not go crazy here?”

“Stay in the field. I don’t know how you sit through all those meetings with the boys. I’d snap necks,” she says cooly.

“I just—” she falters. Opening up isn’t her strong suit. She’s prided herself on being a self-sufficient island. But standing there she realizes that it’s while it’s a great way to survive, it’s no way to _live_.

“You want to know the worst part about it?” Maria says. “They second guess me so often, even the good ones—I’ve started to second guess _myself_.”

May doesn’t say anything, just listens; she hands Maria a water bottle. Maria tosses the cap off and guzzles it.

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “Any advice? Advise me. Impart your wisdom to me or whatever.”

May has a way of standing so still. Finally, she says, “It gets easier as you get older. It’ll get easier to trust yourself. Trust your gut and keep speaking up,” with the hint of a shrug. “And if that fails…”

“Snap necks?” Maria says, pulling the tape off of her knuckles.

“Snap necks.”

 

**

After the Battle of New York is over, Maria finally understands the magnitude of her influence and the power of her decision. When it came to world saving, Tony gets most of the credit, as Tony typically does, and much of it is well-deserved. He flew a nuke into a wormhole, for God’s sake.

But it was Natasha who had the sense to shove Loki’s scepter into the reactor to shut the door to space in the first place. Without her, the radiation would’ve leaked from the sky like blood from a wound, and with it more Chitauri, and the city if not the world would’ve been reduced to ash all the same.

And to think, Maria had almost said nothing to Clint.

“You held your own alongside a demigod, a supersoldier, a 2-ton science experiment gone wrong, and a tin can that shoots lasers, all to defeat an army of aliens,” Maria summarizes to Natasha over a celebratory beer.

“You say that like it’s surprising,” Natasha says wryly.

It really isn’t a surprise. Maria had believed in Natasha from the start. And suddenly Maria realizes that she’s started to believe in _herself_ again.

 

**

Not even as a child did Maria put much stock into the concept of “best friends.” While other girls made friendship bracelets and braided each other’s hair, she climbed trees and looked down from them, observing, highly interested but unable to fully engage. She was an outsider, for reasons chosen and unchosen. But being around Nat is like finding out there’d been another girl up in the tree with her all along.

Falling in love feels like an admission of guilt, not to mention futile given the fact Natasha is most likely straight, so Maria fights it off to prove a point to herself: she hadn’t wanted Nat’s life spared for _that._

They grow close incrementally, slowly, through scattered conversations, trips to the gun range, and the complete and total collapse of SHIELD. They hold each other briefly when they think Fury’s dead.

“It goes without saying,” Fury says between coughs, “that you can’t tell her yet.”

“Why? Because you think she’s Hydra?” Maria asks. “We both know she’s not Hydra.”

“I hope she’s not,” Fury says.

“I _know_ she’s not.”

“We’ll worry about that later. You just worry about how we’re going to take out those helicarriers.”

“Ah, about that. I have an idea,” she says confidently.

 

**

“So. You and Rogers. You banging grandpa?” Maria asks Nat as casually as she can muster, after a trip to visit Rogers in the hospital. Project Insight almost killed them all and Maria wants to know where Nat stands. She has to know: she almost lost her. They’re all just lucky to be alive after the past few days. It’s _dizzying_.  

“He’s not exactly my type,” Nat says, as they walk through the hallway and out into the parking lot. The sun hits them full-force.

“Too pure for your tastes?”

“Too male,” Natasha corrects.

_“Oh.”_

And suddenly it makes sense why her and Barton aren’t a couple, despite being attached at the hip. Nat possessed many surprising characteristics when you really got to know her: dry humor, a penchant for sentimental jewelry, and apparently (thankfully, miraculously, wonderfully) lesbianism.

Nat slinks toward her then, and slips her arms around Maria’s waist, and kisses her urgently up against a car. That 30 seconds is better than ten years worth of fantasies.

 

**

“Thanks for saving me,” Nat says, just before pressing a kiss to Maria’s naked hip.

“...What?”

“From Rumlow. In the van. You know, _last week_?”

“Ah, right. That bastard.”

 

**

They don’t talk about what the sex means. It’s difficult to cultivate the words when they’re too busy gasping and climaxing together, fingers slick with each other’s desire, stifling moans and smirking about it all later in team meetings as they plan to annihilate what remains of Hydra.

They are both used to keeping secrets. At least this is a happy one.

“Meet me later?”

“I make no promises,” Nat says teasingly. And wasn’t that the truth. They make no promises nor plans nor declarations. It isn’t exactly their style. They are _the job_ , the both of them. It’s precisely why they get along. They are two lone wolves who barely knew how to howl at the moon; saying _I love you_ would take some time _._

 

**

“Tony wants me to flirt with Bruce to keep him on the team,” Nat explains. “He says Bruce needs a reason to stay.”

“ _What?_ ”

“I told him to go fuck himself.”

“So you’re not going to do it?”

“Hell no,” Nat says. “That’s not fair to Bruce. Besides. I’m already taken.”

“Did you tell _him_ that?”

“No,” she says, edging closer, going in for the kill, a kiss. “But I’m telling _you_.”

 

**

There’s still Sokovian dirt underneath Maria’s fingernails when she and Nat unofficially move into the same room at the new upstate Avengers HQ.

“Stop stealing my clothes,” Maria commands.

“You like it.”

It’s true, Maria loves the sight of it: Nat in nothing but one of her crisp button down work shirts and panties. Or Nat showing up to a team meeting in Maria’s favorite sweatshirt, winking. How did she even get her hands on it? The security in the facility is lax.

“Thief,” Maria accuses later as they pant into each other’s mouths.

“Guilty as charged,” Nat says sensuously.  

“I’m going to need this back,” Maria says. It’s quite the dilemma. She can’t decide which she enjoys more: seeing Nat marked as hers, or peeling Nat’s clothes off. She settles on the latter in that moment, slipping her hands under the soft fabric and making Nat’s breath catch.

 

**

They establish routines upstate: meals and runs and poker with Steve and Sam, training exercises with Wanda, competitive swims in the lap-pool with Rhodes. When Tony’s around, which is rare these days, they talk tech and laugh off his jokes about threesomes. He doesn’t even know they’re together, nobody does, officially. That’s just Tony being _Tony._

But Vision catches them kissing once in the kitchen in the middle of the night, because he doesn’t need sleep and can materialize out of nowhere like a damn ghost.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’ll just be going.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Maria assures awkwardly. “We were just making a midnight snack.” She gestures to the bowl of cookie dough on the counter to offer proof.

“Midnight snack,” he says, mulling the phrase over. He glances at the clock on the microwave and looks perplexed. It’s 2:30AM. Maria and Nat are both nightowls.

“It’s just an expression,” Nat explains. “You want some?” She holds out a spoonful of chocolate chip dough.

He cocks his head to one side to inspect it. “I don’t...well, I don’t eat. But I do enjoy the smells of food. This has a pleasant aroma. Thank you.”

He just stands there and smells and smells the gob of cookie dough and Maria tries very, very hard not to laugh.

 

**

Neither of them are the picket fence type, so their room and their routines starts to feel like the closest they’ll get to a normal life. It’s their own version of domestic bliss: the compound is their house, the other avengers are their children (with the exception of Steve, who is most certainly the dad to their role as moms), and hell, the team even has a pet. There’s a cat roaming around the upper floor. Wanda found it in the woods and none of them had the heart to tell her no.

It feels like home. And the longer it goes on, the more nights that are spent making love or soothing wounds or shaking off nightmares together, the more it feels like they’re living on borrowed time. They are soldiers, both of them, and deployment feels inevitable.

 

**

“With all due respect, Secretary Ross, I believe there’s a better way we can go about this,” Maria says. “I agree wholeheartedly that there needs to be a higher level of accountability for the enhanced, but I foresee the potential for government overreach within this draft of the Accords. With your permission, I can personally oversee a committee that might close some of these loopholes.”

“Thank you for your input, Agent Hill,” Secretary Ross says. He doesn’t sound very thankful. “But that won’t be necessary.”

 

**

“Nat,” Maria whispers, sidling up behind her, her chest to Nat’s bare, lightly freckled back.

“Let me guess,” Nat says, “You want me to agree to it tomorrow when he comes.”

Nat’s not supposed to know he’s coming. Which in and of itself is a red-flag to Maria. Why would Ross want to spring it on them and make them decide in the span of an afternoon? Why not write the documents _with_ them? Why not take more time?

Maria huffs a sigh into Nat’s hair. Her hair still smells like an explosion, even though Nat’s washed it three times. “I want you to _act_ like you agree to it. Just for now. Just until I can figure out what the hell is really going on. I need more eyes on Ross.”

“It’s not a terrible idea, the Accords,” Nat admits.

“It’s not. I like it, in theory.”

“But in _practice_ …”

“In practice, it just makes it easier for Ross to lock up people he doesn’t like. And he doesn’t like _you,_ ” Maria says bitterly. “Not after your little speech in DC.”

“What’s that phrase you’re always saying? _Trust your gut and keep speaking up_? I was just following your advice,” Nat says playfully. She turns around so that they’re nose to nose.

“Nobody is going to lock me up,” Nat assures more seriously.

Maria kisses her, open-mouthed and desperate at the thought of her in a cell.

 

**

While staring at Colonel Rhoades’ x-rays for the umpteenth time, Maria overhears Tony tell Nat, “Ross knows you let Barnes go, so. They’re coming for you.”

“I’m not the one who needs to watch their back,” Nat says.

 

**

Every news outlet reports that Steve Rogers is the one who broke the Avengers out of the Raft prison, but that isn’t the _whole_ story. Behind the scenes of history, there are countless hidden women working to steer humanity's fate toward the light.

Steve _was_ going to risk it alone, until Maria and Natasha showed up and Nat very gently called him a stubborn idiot and enlisted the help of an entire army. Natasha managed to convince Wakanda’s Dora Milaje to join the fight, because the stakes were so high to her. Clint was imprisoned. She owed him her life, after all.

She says as much to Clint, afterward, when they’re back in a Wakandan palace with the rest of the team. It’s there that he finally corrects her, casually, the old promise to Maria be damned.

“That wasn’t even my idea,” Clint says ruefully. “It was Hill’s. And she made a damn good judgement call.”

 

**

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Nat asks softly, when they’re naked and sated in a guesthouse bed, with warm jungle air and sunlight streaming in from the open window. She’s not mad, or accusatory, or anything but quietly happy, coming down from a post-mission high. She’s curled around Maria, cat-like and languid, her head resting on Maria’s shoulder, enjoying the humid afternoon.

“I didn’t want you to feel like you owed me. You don’t owe me anything.”

“But I do,” Nat says. “Listen—Hey, look at me,” she says, sitting up a little and cupping Maria’s face gently. “I was in a bad place when Clint found me. I was—well, there was part of me that wanted somebody to kill me. I wanted out of my life, but I didn’t know how to get out. I didn’t know how to start over. And then it turns out this guy actually wants to help me, wants to make me an offer...I know you wonder if anything we’ve done matters in the grand scheme. I don’t know. Maybe the world would’ve saved itself without us. But you saved _me_. I owe you everything.”

Maria presses a kiss to those full lips, the ones she’s been dreaming of since another lifetime ago. Her feelings for Nat used to be suppressed background noise, but now they’re booming: a full-blown symphony. No amount of bird-chatter or insect buzz from the rainforest outside can cover the sound.

There’s not a thing Maria wouldn’t do to keep her safe: she’d charge into the Raft alone to free her, she’d scale mountains, she’d sprout wings and _fly_. She didn’t just love Nat, she adores her.

No one could work a room, or a gun, or a hostage situation better than Nat. No one could interrogate more shrewdly or fight more efficiently or seduce more convincingly. And it seemed that no one else could endure so much trauma yet still want to help the world.

“You’re it for me,” Maria says. “You know that, right?”

“ _I do,_ ” Nat says, and it might as well be a marriage vow, and this might as well be a honeymoon, and the whole of life zeros down to nothing but Nat’s face, sunlit and smiling and _alive._

 

* * *

 

YEARS LATER

 

She’s new, she’s young, she’s an accountant—she shouldn’t be in space.

That’s what the bosses told her at HQ, despite the fact she’d had 5 years of flight training prior to her desk job with the new and improved SHIELD. But Director Hill had thankfully stood up for her, and it was Hill that signed her permission papers and sent her off toward the moon, toward Thanos, toward _chaos_.

Nobody up here knows her, but that doesn’t matter, she thinks. She’s doing her job and that’s what matters.

There was a hole in Quill’s helmet and he hadn’t noticed it. She’d stopped him at the last minute and patched it up with duct tape before giving him the all-clear to head off back into the fray. If the reports are to be believed, he has actually managed to win us the war.

When she’s back on Earth, when her boots are shaking on the ground, a news anchor rushes at her with a microphone, begging for a first-hand account of the battles.

He doesn’t ask for her name, but she squares her shoulders and states it for the record anyway.  

  



End file.
